The Monster of Florence by Douglas Preston with Mario Spezi - review

Jake Kerridge a Florentine serial killer

By Jake Kerridge

12:15PM GMT 28 Jan 2009

The Monster of Florence was the name given to the serial killer who murdered seven young couples in the Florentine countryside between 1974 and 1985. His method of killing was to sneak up on people canoodling in parked cars and shoot them. He usually mutilated his female victims, sometimes cutting off and spiriting away their sexual organs.

The identity of the Monster has never been proved, even though the killings prompted the most expensive police investigation in Italy’s history. The case inspired parts of Thomas Harris’s novel Hannibal and his description of policemen disguising themselves as courting couples in order to bait the killer is based on fact.

It would appear that the Italian law-enforcement agencies are every bit as corrupt and inept as most crime novels set in Italy suggest they are. In 1994 a Tuscan farmer called Pietro Pacciani was tried and convicted for the murders, the police arguing that he was in the pay of a Satanic cult made up of Italian grandees. He was freed on appeal in 1996 after Piero Tony, the lawyer who was supposed to be arguing for the conviction to be upheld, declared that the police investigation put him in mind of The Pink Panther. This book alleges that some investigators falsified evidence and bribed witnesses. The journalist Mario Spezi has reported on the killings for the newspaper La Nazione since the Eighties and is recognised as Italy’s leading “Monstrologer”. He has covered all aspects of the affair, from the inadequacies of the police to the ways in which gossip and innuendo have damaged innocent lives, including the case of a pizza-maker who cut his throat after being taunted over his resemblance to a police portrait of the Monster.

In 2000, Spezi was introduced to Douglas Preston, an American writer of blockbuster thrillers. This book is Preston’s account of the case based on Spezi’s recollections. It includes a description of Spezi and Preston’s interview with the man they believe to be the Monster, a fairly banal encounter and all the more chilling for it. That interview would no doubt have been the climax of the book, had Spezi not appeared on television in 2004 criticising Michele Giuttari, the detective in charge of the “Squadra Anti-Mostro”. He subsequently became the focus of police attention himself. In 2006 Preston was accused of colluding with Spezi in falsifying evidence relating to the murders and threatened with arrest unless he left Italy. Shortly afterwards, Spezi was arrested on charges of obstructing justice.

The public prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, invoking a law normally only used in terrorist or Mafia cases, ordered that Spezi be denied access to lawyers and kept in solitary confinement. Rumours started to circulate that Spezi was himself suspected of being the Monster. Preston, with the backing of a number of human rights organisations, petitioned the Italian Government and a tribunal acquitted Spezi of all charges.

Preston punctuates his narrative with lengthy digressions on Italian history and attempts to anatomise the people of Florence by examining their reactions to these crimes: mostly a mixture of fear, suspicion and frank enjoyment (during Pacciani’s trial, “I _ Pacciani” T-shirts sold well among young women). These reflective passages are fairly perfunctory though: the main point of the book is to tell a rattling good story. Preston has arranged his material with skill and presents a great deal of complicated information lucidly and with good pace. He has a nice line in self-deprecating humour – his account of his attempt to deploy his limited Italian to defend himself against serious criminal charges is amusing.

Preston sometimes slips into a clichéd thriller style and his unremitting hero worship gets rather wearing. Neither does he address the question of whether such extreme pressure might not have been applied to the police to get results if Spezi’s emotive journalism had not fuelled the public furore over the killings.

But there is no doubt that Italy needs more people like Spezi keeping an eye on its justice system. As for Giuttari and Mignini, they deny charges of abuse of office. Mignini remains in his job as Public Prosecutor while his trial continues, and is currently a key figure in the investigation into the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher.